Sort of creepy…

I looked at the graph again, and somehow Excel can see into the future, because it’s the 18th today, and the graph shows data out to the 26th. Where it got this information I don’t know, but I’ll take it as a good sign for the coming week.

Google Chrome Review

Google’s chrome hit the web just before 1900UTC today… 

The first page you’re greeted with is a home page is a list of your most visited links with thumbnail screenshots of them. I haven’t used Opera in years but I think this is an Opera-ism.

There are no standard menus (File, Edit, etc.). I was a bit stumped at first at how to get to the options. I liked the home page so much I wanted to see if I could get a “Home” button on my top bar. The only two menus available (I suppose they could be deemed “page” and “browser” menus) are accessible via icons to the right of the “omnibar” (FF3 wins here: “awesomebar” is a better name). 

The interface and UI deviates greatly from the standard XP look which I deem as bad form. A UI should be consistent with the other programs. Further, the theme is very Vista/Aero’esque but I run XP with the classic theme and Chrome sticks out like a (colourful) sore thumb. I find the tabs at the top of the window means that on a window full of tabs my eyes need to dart over my bookmark bar and the URL bar to see the title of the page I’m at. It doesn’t seem to save any real-estate either.

Conclusion:

Likes:

• “Most visited” home page
• (Attempt at a) simpler design
• Happy to see the browser market shaken up
• Pages are rendering well (which is to say “as I expect them to”)
• You can grab tabs and drag them off the window to start a new window (I can’t say how many times I’ve tried doing this with Firefox only to remember it doesn’t have that feature. Thank you Google!)
• Good import of Firefox bookmarks during install
• Browser specific “Task manager”  with interesting “Stats for nerds” link for each page

Dislikes:

• UI doesn’t blend in nicely with the rest of my (XP) OS/programs
• Tabs at top seems pointless and makes me move my eyes and mouse further to switch tabs (and is another OS deviation)
• Very simple and unscientific javascript test did not compete with Firefox3
• Lack of configuration options is going to be an issue very quickly (but it’s the first beta so they have an excuse)

__COMPAT_LAYER=EnableNXShowUI

I encountered a strange problem today where my korn shell on XP wasn’t behaving properly. In particular, pipes weren’t working, effectively making ksh useless.

I eventually noticed that the problem would go away if I opened up Control Panel->System, Advanced tab, Environment Variables and then closed it. I opened a console before and after doing this and found that the environment was changing even though I wasn’t adding or removing anything.

Before going into the Environment Variables configuration window the __COMPAT_LAYER environment variable was set to “EnableNXShowUI” but afterwards it was not set at all. Further investigation found that the [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags\Layers] registry key had this set for explorer.exe. I’ve deleted this registry setting a few times but it keeps coming back.

I don’t really want to be having to unset this every time I start up, but until I find out what’s setting the registry setting I guess I’ll have to make environment variable configuration part of my morning boot routine.

GnuCash

Last month I took an interest in keeping my finances tracked and orderly and returned to GnuCash. I stopped using it when I got a Mac because I assumed that the Mac would have something that would have something with iLife that would do finances and I wanted to do everything the “Mac Way” *tm*.

The closest thing I could find was the free installation of Quicken that came with my Mac and it was all talk and no work. It started to seamlessly import all my transactions and let me create a budget and everything but there were no useful hotkeys (meaning lots of mouse work) and in the end it was slow and didn’t present anything in a way I could use.

I got GnuCash built on my Mac and  got it up to date. I didn’t find the budgeting features did things in a way that I could use (probably due to my complete lack of budgeting experience though) and so I’ve started to look at enhancing the Scheduled Transaction (SX) engine.

Before I could do this I had to be able to be able to build GnuCash quickly, and my Mini just wasn’t cutting it. This meant back to my Debian system.

Before I could do that I had to get osx2x back up and running

Then finally I got some work done:

http://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-devel/2007-January/019742.html 

 http://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-devel/2007-February/019788.html

http://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-devel/2007-February/019791.html 

http://lists.gnucash.org/pipermail/gnucash-devel/2007-February/019792.html 

This stuff just added an enabled/disabled flag to the SX’s. I hope to move onto some more “love bugs” and then try to get some sort of “SX Projection Report” that will apply SX’s against any set of accounts out to an arbitrary date.

Dvorak map for osx2x

I’ve been used to having my laptop be controlled (or control) other systems via x2x/win2vnc/x2vnc and without fail there existed osx2x for when I’m and home and I want to have my laptop controlled via my Mac’s keyboard/mouse. Unfortunately for me the keymap doesn’t translate what OSX uses and instead only offers QWERTY or German kepmaps (even though it claimed to handle french and Japanese in the preferences).

I got ahold of the source code, removed the references to French and Japanese in the preferences window, and added a Dvorak option. I don’t think the osx2x website has been updated in a number of years (which is too bad for them because Open Darwin is shutting down), and I’ve sent an inquiry email to the maintainer but in the meantime here’s my build of osx2x (built with Xcode 2.4.1).

BlackBerry Syncing From Linux (not yet)

After getting my BlackBerry, my first question was “how do I sync it with Linux?”. The answers were mostly disappointing, but after some searching the closet thing to actually doing it is barry.

To download it, visit the sourceforge project page

Reading Windows shares as non-root user

I was able to get some window shares mounted, and was able access them as root, but non-root users did not have any access. The permissions of the files were 0770 and I couldn’t override the permissions despite using the file_mode,dir_mode,uid, and gid options specified in the mount.cifs manpage.

The solution is to use the (undocumented in the 3.0.14a version that Debian Sarge packages) noperm option. This option ignores any client-side permission checks and relies on the server to keep you honest. The documentation for these options have been updated in the trunk version of the mount.cifs manpage.

PCI -> SATA -> RAID1 -> LVM -> ext3

Getting this wonderful setup took quite a bit of troubleshooting, so I thought I’d share my instructions. Note that my root partition is not on this disk (it’s on another SCSI (hardware) RAID array (/dev/sda).

• Update all BIOS/firmware (my BIOS didn’t deal with the PCI SATA card until the BIOS was upgraded).
• Create single large partitions on each of my two SATA disks (fdisk). Set the type to 0xfd (Linux RAID autodetect).
• Add the modules for my SATA/RAID PCI card to /etc/modules. Also add sd_mod, md_mod, my SATA module (sata_sil), and raid1.
• apt-get install mdadm lvm2
• Alter /etc/mdadm.conf:
  DEVICE /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1
  ARRAY /dev/md0 devices=/dev/sdb1,/dev/sdc1
• Create the RAID array with mdadm
  mdadm –create /dev/md0 –level raid1 –raid-devices=2 –spare-devices=0 –auto=yes /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1
• Reboot and `cat /proc/mdstat` to make sure the drives are active and sync’ing.
• Create the physical volume.
  pvcreate /dev/md0
• Create the volume group.
  vgcreate MYVGNAME /dev/md0
• Create the logical volume
  lvcreate -L120G -n mylvname MYVGNAME
• Make my filesystem
  mke2fs -j /dev/MYVGNAME/mylvname
• Mount my new filesystem
  mount -t ext3 /dev/MYVGNAME/mylvname /mnt

PHEW!